Tuesday, January 29, 2013

The State of the Golden State According to Jerry Brown

Last week, California Governor Jerry
Brown got up in front of our state legislators and proclaimed
that the Golden State had “confounded our critics”.In the sense that we haven’t yet
self-destructed I suppose he’s right, but the Governor’s triumphalist address, the
full extent of his muddled, opaque, and often contradictory thinking was on
display.

Students on UC and CSU campuses should
welcome Brown’s rhetorical refusal “to let the students become the default
financiers of our colleges and universities”, and we should do whatever we can
to see that he lives up to those words, and to see that other decision makers
hear them.

Equally welcome was Brown’s invocation
of the threat posed by climate change, to which, he argued, “California is
extremely vulnerable because of our Mediterranean climate, long coastline and
reliance on snowpack for so much of our water supply”.

But when one moved beyond the more
sweeping rhetoric, Brown ran into troubles.Characteristically, he echoed his perennial call for embracing
limitations.“It is cruel”, the Governor
argued, “to lead people on by expanding good programs, only to cut them back
when the funding disappears.That is not
progress; it is not even progressive.It
is illusion.That stop and go, boom and
bust, serves no one”.Imbibed without
the benefit of critical thought, the Governor’s words sound fine.But they are actually rather disturbing.His cynically-invoked fear of disappointing
people is a recipe for stasis.How, if
we always declined to act on the basis that someday someone might change some
of the things we create, would we ever create or achieve anything?Is it never important to do the right thing?

Brown’s premise (not unlike that of Prop
13 which continues to cripple our state) ignores the moving principle behind a
democracy, which is that each generation of citizens is free, within broad
constitutional guidelines which they may change too if they like, to chart
their own way.I fear that his invocation
of “illusion” is nothing more than a rhetorical ploy to stymie those who would
like to preside over a desperately-needed reinvestment in our public
sphere.

On some level, Brown would be at home
with the slavering, barking Tea Party-ers.He might have joined them in their collective whinge against the
healthcare law—“it’s too big...it’s too complicated” (as though the provision
of healthcare for millions of people within a system constrained by our moral
limits is a simple matter that could be summed up in 500 words or less)—as when
he cited the Ten Commandments as an example of commendable legislative brevity.The Governor is right to suggest that we need
to reform and in many respects simplify the management and funding of
California’s schools.But to pretend
that there is some simple formula out there plays into the hands of the critics
for whom wholesale evisceration is the ultimate ambition.

Brown is, of course, right to critique
an education system which “requires quiz-bits of information, regurgitated at
regular intervals and stored in vast computers”.It is indeed wrong that “a stark, single
number” has the potential to “encapsulate the precise achievement level of
every child”.But to blame this on centralisation
per se rather than on the method or character of that centralisation is the
easy, incomplete, and inadequate way out.After all, devolving authority en masse to schools or districts risks
turning the state education system into something resembling our national
education system: where in some states creationism is taught as a scientific
theory; where the Civil War, Jim Crow, the rise of capitalism, and the
internment of Japanese Americans are all re-written to conform to a “patriotic”
version of our history; where, in short, students are short-changed because of the
ideological ambitions of pre-modern fundamentalists.

It might instead be more productive to
quote something a little more recent than the Ten Commandments.Brown and his administration could do worse
than to read David Lilienthal, a proponent of the decentralisation of
centralised power, a process he described as the endeavour to “delegate,
dilute, and withdraw federal power out of
Washington and back into the regions and states and localities...”*Note, he is not discussing the destruction of
legitimate, centralised authority which is the only kind of authority with the perspective
and the legitimacy to promote a universalistic view of the common good (i.e.
equality).Rather, Lilienthal endorsed
the repositioning of that authority, precisely the kind of move which might aid
in reforming California’s chaotic education structure.

Putting power closer to the people, a
favourite refrain of Washington-based Congressional representatives who are
generally interested in doing anything but
giving up their own power, doesn’t have to mean putting that power in the hands
of lower-level authorities in a way that sounds nice but might lead to gross
inequities in standards or access.It
could mean sending the executors of centralised authority to the localities so
that they too are attuned to local conditions.In a sense it would be to expand the mandate of centralised educational
authority, but in a way calculated to democratise the execution of their
authority and their consumption of information from smaller-scale units.

Brown, between quoting Yeats and
Portola, proposed the principle of subsidiarity, which he described as “the
idea that a central authority should only perform those tasks which cannot be
performed at a more immediate or local level”.“Subsidiarity is offended”, he remarked, invoking a theory as though it
was a “thing” (something he castigated others for doing in the case of
education), “when distant authorities prescribe in minute detail what is
taught, how it is taught, and how it is to be measured”.

Brown’s theorising ignores the fact that
it is not always a matter of the ability of local authorities to perform tasks,
but rather their ability or willingness to perform them in a way which reflects
our society’s push for an equality more expansive and substantive than the
hollow “equality of opportunity” which postulates that anyone born into
twenty-first century American society who does not fall into an embarrassment of
riches is somehow suffering from a character flaw.The alternative to the micromanagement of
curricula is not necessarily the wholesale devolution of power, although the
caricature is one which suits Brown.

The era of limits does not, it seems,
extend to politicians’ rhetoric.Brown
attempted soaring tones: “We—right here in California—have such a rendezvous
with destiny”.But to Brown, destiny is
a dry, dusty auditor, more interested in checking dreams, bringing ambitions up
short, and squelching desires than in enabling the dramatic, expansive, and
progressive kind of California to which the Governor alluded in his historical
remarks.

About Me

I am from Northern California, and am the fifth generation of my family to have lived in the Golden State. Now I live next-door in the Silver State, where I work as an assistant professor of history at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas. I research and write about colonialism and decolonization in Africa, teach European, African, environmental, and colonial history, and write this blog, mostly about politics, sometimes about history, and occasionally about travels or research. This blog also appears on the website of the Redding Record Searchlight.